Creative Themes Design

10 Tips to Make the Best Sites for Your Clients

07/22/2010  |  Category: Blog  |  132 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

The biggest challenge of any programmer or developer is to be able to deliver a product, a website for example, to the client’s satisfaction. Price & schedules keep changing most of the time because your customer would keep on changing them with time.

They are not to blame – a website design is a lot of creative work & customers often are not sure what they really want. Over time, we have adopted a few ways that help us choose our clients intelligently, understand their business needs & why they want a website designed & thus deliver a superb quality website!

10 Tips to Make the Best Sites for Your Clients

1. Choose Website Design Projects Carefully

1. 1. This is especially true if you are bidding on projects on various freelancing forums. Many times clients would not be able to provide you with suitable data & enough information to quote a price & you may struggle with cost & schedule as their requirements would keep evolving.

Choose projects where your clients show sufficient clarity on what they need & what they expect from you.

1. 2. Requirements change, needs evolve. We have not seen a single project in the last 10+ years where the clients have not deviated from the requirements they started off with. Longer the project schedule higher are the chances of changing or evolving requirements.

Plan your project so that customers can evaluate what you are building from time to time & confirm whether they are on board with your design.

1.3. Program in modules. Especially your style guides. Nothing impacts your cost & delivery time like a change in the overall design that changes your style sheets.

For large projects we found that creating mock-up HTML files often help clients understand how their design would finally look like on a website.

Develop mock ups where possible.

2. Help Clients Understand Business Functionality

2.1 Clients often verbally express what all they want on their pages but it is often hard for them to understand complicated workflow. We bring in our expertize to the table to help them better understand the user’s experience, using white boards, paper drawings, flow charts & similar tools to help them visualize a real life situation when their web site would be live.

Use multiple tools to design work flows, use cases & test scenarios.

2.2. Understand system limitations in implementing a design. Especially if you are using a out-of-the-box CMS tool like WordPress, you may not be able to build all the features that your clients want. Or, it could just be easier to add-on functionality with available plugins rather than building them from scratch.

Know system limitations, available stable re-usable codes like plugins for out-of-the-box systems.

3. Test, Test & Test your product before you deliver the codes to your client

3.1. Visual Tests – Test in all the browsers IE7, IE8, Firefox 3 – 4, Safari 4 – 5 or whatever are the latest versions of these. Though few, there are still a lot of people using Flock & Google Chrome.

3.2. Functional Tests – create your functional test scenarios well in advance. It is a great idea to have your client understand what you are testing for & that they approve of the completeness of the tests.

4. Post Live Support

4.1. May clients come up with new requirements during the first couple of weeks of the website going live. These are usually new or modifications of some of the requirements you began with & are often not accounted in your prices. The right thing to do in a post-live support period is to only fix defects or bugs at your cost.

4.2. Create a User Document, or a FAQ that could help your client use your product. In case you have used GPL plugins & codes, it is a good idea to mention them to your clients upfront & also document the sources for their future references.

4.3. This is something we always do with our clients. At the end of a large website development, we provide our recommendations on how to manage, enhance & maintain the website at a minimal expense. We also make ourselves available to help them get over minor issues with their websites (our products). We also notify them of any “known issues” that we may have found with the website while building or testing.

Transparency with clients helps you deliver a better product. Cost & schedules will always be the point of contention but like us, if you look at the first project with any client as the beginning of a business relationship, you may be able to work out a cost that is mutually beneficial to both the parties.